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Multi-Energy Models for European Energy System Planning

The 2030 and 2050 EU’s carbon reduction targets are calling for significant changes in our energy system: more flexibility, more active involvement of all stakeholders and more collaboration to enable least-cost integration of higher deployment of variable renewable energy sources.

Seven partners, among them market actors, energy system experts, mathematical optimization academics and computer science specialists, joined in the plan4res consortium with the objective of filling the gaps between the increasing complexity of the future energy system planning and operational problems, and the currently available system analysis tools. The consortium is composed of Electricité de France (France, Project Coordinator), Siemens AG Corporate Technology (Germany), Cray Computer GmbH (Switzerland), RWTH Aachen (Germany), Imperial College London (UK), Zuse Institut Berlin (Germany), and Interuniversity Consortium for Optimization and Operation Research (Italy).

Operating the electricity system with the targeted high shares of renewable energy sources (RES) will only be possible and affordable if both the grid and the generation assets evolve towards a system designed to maximize its capacity to host such amounts of RES. This requires optimizing existing assets and new investments, making the best use of all flexibilities (considering geographical location and which services they provide to the system) and developing new services to support the energy system. We believe that an integrated representation of the system is necessary to achieve European climate objectives in a cost effective way, for all the stakeholders participating in the system operation and development.

However, such an integrated representation will require overcoming significant technical hurdles in order to allow a set of different but highly interconnected models (strategic investment – operational simulation – multi-modal system integration) to work synergistically while retaining the modularity (possibility of representing only sub-parts of the system, either functionally, geographically or on a specific time horizon, with a specific time resolution, or replacing every model and algorithm by another one) which is necessary for tailoring the tool to the different needs of various stakeholders.

The main deliverables of the project will be :1- An end-to-end planning and operation tool, composed of a set of optimization models based on an integrated modeling of the European Energy System, including

Dynamics of energy system development and transformation, in particular with and without perfect foresight

A representation of the interactions of multi-modal energy vectors and the impact on available flexibility

A subnational representation of the grid and potential cross-border energy exchange

3- Efficient solving algorithms that are developed and improved for plan4res applications, used for enhancing the existing solvers including SCIP, and fine-tuned for increasing solution performance of plan4res models. Related studies include: